Microsoft's First Ever Azure Goverment Hackfest & Training Event

On June 7, 2017, more than 75 developers and IT professionals gathered together for the first ever Microsoft Azure Government HackFest + Training event including one of Accelera Solutions’ very own, Bryce Harding, Senior Systems Engineer.

Spanning over two days at Microsoft’s Chevy Chase, Md. location, attendees came to learn about Microsoft Azure, building and securing complaint applications, getting past lift and shift with PaaS, as well as Cognitive Services and Big Data on Azure Government. Also included on the agenda were hands-on sessions for deploying Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS) which later become handy for the Hackathon competition. The day one session quickly came to an end and the real fun was about to begin.

On day two, participants assembled into eight different teams. They were presented with the following series and challenges in which they had to create a problem, and deploy creative infrastructure to solve the problem(s):

Building solutions on Azure Government PaaS services

Building a secure/compliant IaaS network infrastructure on Azure Government

Utilizing Cognitive Services on Azure Government

Leveraging Big Data on Azure Government with HDInsight and Power BI

Bryce was nominated to lead and present for his team. They chose challenge number two: “Building a secure/compliant IaaS network infrastructure on Azure Government.” They worked together to configure Azure resource groups, create VLAN subnets, Network Security Groups, VMs, VPN Gateway a connections, and utilized Azure Automation for bonus points in the competition. Competition was fierce, but Bryce and his team came with a game plan where they utilized key fundamental elements of Microsoft Azure and graphic runbooks within Azure Automation to take second place.